The Irascible Professor
SMIrreverent Commentary
on the State of Education in America Today

by Dr. Mark H. Shapiro

"No
one tests the depth of a river with both feet."....
....African proverb.

Commentary of the Day -
July 19, 2007: Dump the SAT!

In a remarkable
about face Charles Alan Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve,
Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, is calling
upon elite colleges and universities in the United States to stop
using basic SAT scores as part of the admissions process. The
College Board, which sponsors the SAT I verbal, math, and writing
tests, long has touted these tests as valuable predictors of a
student's potential for success in college. However, as Murray
admits in his recent American.com article "Abolish the SAT"
these tests do no better at predicting how successful an applicant
will be in his or her first year of college than the student's
performance on the SAT II subject matter tests, or for that matter
the student's high school grades.

For those of you who
may not be familiar with Murray or The Bell Curve, he is a
libertarian scholar who with his now deceased co-author Richard
Hernstein claimed that affirmative action and other liberal social
policies were a waste of resources because of they could not
overcome the inherent genetic inferiority of some minority groups.
Both Murray and Hernstein championed the notion common among some
psychologists that there was a single number g that was a
measure of a person's "intelligence", and that this number could be
determined by appropriately constructed IQ tests. Both of
these notions have been challenged by other researchers on the
grounds that no single number can appropriately describe a person's
"intelligence", and because the cultural biases present in all
so-called IQ tests would make an accurate determination of g
impossible in any case. The Mismeasure of Man by the
noted biologist Steven Jay Gould is a well-written refutation of
Hernstein and Murray's views on intelligence and race.

The IP generally
agrees with Gould that human intelligence is complex and
many-faceted, and that conventional IQ tests capture only a subset
of the traits that comprise "intelligence". We all know people
who score high enough on IQ tests to be members of MENSA, but who
are so lacking in common sense or "street smarts" that they might as
well be members of DENSA.

As Murray correctly
notes in his article, the basic SAT originally was promoted in the
1940s as way to open up the more elite of America's colleges and
universities to highly-qualified students from more diverse social
and geographical backgrounds than was then the case. At that
time the elite Ivy League campuses drew most of their students from
the children of wealthy families mostly living in the northeast part
of the county. As these elite colleges and universities began
to include SAT scores in their admissions criteria, they began to
draw highly-qualified from throughout the country. In
addition, there were huge numbers of returning WWII veterans who
were able to fund their educations with GI Bill grants so that if
they were admitted to a school like Harvard or Yale, they were able
to attend. In the decade between 1945 and 1955 the composition
of the undergraduate population at these institutions became
remarkably more diverse, though many of these institutions still
admitted relatively few Jewish students and relatively few minority
students.

Murray notes that in
the past decade or so the undergraduate population at the nation's
elite colleges and universities has become remarkably less diverse
than it had been in the previous two or three decades. In
fact, the vast majority of students at these institutions indeed do
come from upper-middle class backgrounds. There is far less
economic diversity than once existed at these institutions, and
fewer minority students than before even though these elite colleges
and universities go out of their way to seek such students.

Murray attributes
this situation to the fact that the heavily-relied-upon SAT is "g-loaded".
In other words only highly intelligent students do well on the SAT,
and most highly intelligent students are the sons and daughters of
the upper-middle class. It's the old Catch-22 of IQ. To
be in the upper-middle class these days you have to have a very good
job. But most of the very good jobs these days require a lot
of intelligence. And, since - according to Hernstein and
Murray - there is a high component of heritability in intelligence,
it's going to be the children of the upper-middle class who are most
intelligent. In addition, the upper-middle class folks are the
ones who have the wherewithal to see to it that their kids go to
good high schools and to obtain SAT coaching if needed. So
it's the sons and daughters of the upper-middle class who get into the
elite private colleges and universities.

This situation,
Murray argues, leads to a sense of "intellectual entitlement" among
these upper-middle class students. High SAT I scores feed this
sense of entitlement, and discourages those who do not do well on the
SAT I tests. Since college and university admissions officers can
learn just as much from SAT II subject matter tests and high school
grades, Murray concludes that we might as well abandon the SAT I tests.

The IP agrees with
Murray that the SAT I tests might as well be dumped, or at least made
optional. They add little to what is learned from the SAT II
subject matter tests combined with high school grades. More
importantly, the correlation between test scores, SAT I or SAT II, high
school grades and success in college pretty much disappears after the
freshman year. The criteria used for admission to college simply
don't predict success in college in the long run. The reason for
this ought to be obvious. While a certain level of intelligence is
needed to cope with college-level work, intelligence alone is not
sufficient for success in college. A host of other personal
characteristics are needed.

Where the IP parts
company with Murray is in his conclusion that the reason for the narrow
socio-economic profile of students at elite colleges and universities is
primarily one of superior intelligence being a property mostly of the
upper-middle class. What Murray conveniently neglects is the
recent rapid rise in college costs together with the fluid nature of the
American family. While many of these elite institutions offer
financial aid packages to help students from families that don't have as
much disposable income as the upper-middle class families, much of that
aid is now in the form of loans rather than scholarships. Many
students from poorer families simply cannot bear the long-term financial
burden that these loans present. The lower cost, less elite public
colleges and universities simply are more affordable. Here at
decidedly less than elite Krispy Kreme U (aka Cal State Fullerton) we
probably have three or four thousand students among our 30,000 plus
student body who could compete easily with any of the students at
Harvard or Yale. But, they come from middle class, lower-middle
class, and even poor families that could never hope to send their
children to an elite college or university.

The notion that
almost all the "smart" kids are sons and daughters of upper-middle class
families simply is fallacious. Apparently, Murray is completely
unaware of the divorce rate in this country, and its economic
consequences. Children don't become less intelligent because their
parents divorce, but they do become a lot less wealthy and a lot less
likely to be admitted to an elite college or university. And, for
a variety of reasons not all highly intelligent people who do not get
divorced make it into the upper-middle class. Some choose
service-oriented careers that may not pay as much, and others choose to
live in areas that don't have as many high-paying jobs available.
Their children also are a lot less likely to attend an elite college or
university.